Luke, the brewer behind Cloudburst, was talking about a heavily hopped lager that he disliked for its first month and then came to enjoy once the hops settled in. Drinkers prize freshness above everything, he says, so a brewery that puts out a new IPA every week can't simply hold the beer back until it tastes its best.
…know, you do it? You certainly don't want your drinkers to be like, you know, why are you releasing a month-old beer because it tastes good now, especially with like how we operate. So you certainly kind of have to kind of kind of figure out what works with trial and error and cross your fingers.
How do you solve for that now? Do you use less? Do you like, you know, or is it not a concentration issue? Is it some other better way to get it integrated?
I mean, we've solved for it. So now we have another West Coast pills out that we entered in GABF and we solved for it by adding it a little bit early. We lagered it longer, kind of like, all right, instead of just packaging this beer and have us not like it for two weeks in the can, let's just leave it in the tank and like see where it goes. You know, when you run a brewer that isn't like production obsessed with its one-offs, I mean, like our IPAs have to come out the same day of the week, every week of the year. Everything else, we can kind of, we can wait, you know, a week or two and see how that goes. Or, you know, you just put a beer out, no, and yeah, that's always been one of those cases, even with your IPAs, right? The can shock thing. It's like people want that IP off the line to say they had the freshest can of IPA ever. And I'm like, that IP is way better on day 10 than it is like, you know, right off the line. But that's such a supply-side issue. Like you can't just be like, all right, let's not sell it for 10 days. And then it…
Yeah. Yeah. So then, you know, that kind of goes against your normal assumption where if you are adding a dry hop element to this beer, even if it's a lager, you, you know, the idea of then letting it sit in a tank is going to reduce the effectiveness of what you have just spent a lot of money to…
Yeah. And I mean, I've had friends talk about how like they'll add a product and they're like, all of a sudden, I have no, like it's completely destroyed my head. And it's like, we can't package this beer because there's zero head retention going on here. So they let it, you know, hang out. And…
Fascinating. Anything else to this whole process? I mean, I kind of, yeah, it's just interesting. What else have you learned from using